Incubator Spotlights Elizabeth Weinbloom

The most appealing part of being an instructional designer, according to Elizabeth Weinbloom, is getting to be a lifelong learner. As a freelance instructional designer, Weinbloom has had the opportunity to learn about a variety of topics—from sociology to interior design to middle school civics—by working with clients to create educational materials in a host of different mediums. Now, as the resident Senior Instructional Design Specialist at the Global Health Education and Learning Incubator (GHELI), Weinbloom is diving into global health to help students better engage with and understand the Incubator’s global health materials.

Weinbloom has been an instructional designer for over a decade. She graduated with a master’s degree in Learning Design, Education, and Technology from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and went into freelancing work as she was trying to figure out what she wanted to do with her degree. Soon, she had a full slate of clients, and she realized that she could make a career out of freelancing.

Weinbloom worked as a freelancer and independent contractor for more than ten years, working with clients from educational publishers, ed-tech companies, and others, often building long-term relationships with them. She started to move away from purely freelancing early in the pandemic when there was a boom in online learning opportunities and companies looking for instructional designers. Weinbloom took a job at Sophia Learning, which offers online college-level courses, but when the company started to shift new course development toward business courses, Weinbloom decided she wanted to focus her effort and expertise in a field that would help learners tackle major social challenges. At GHELI, she found an opportunity that aligned with both her drive and her interests. Weinbloom currently works on revising and developing materials for faculty director Sue J. Goldie’s General Education course, GenEd 1063 World Health: Challenges and Opportunities.

Prior to starting at GHELI, Weinbloom had never taken or worked on any courses on health, but she didn’t see this as a drawback; to her, it was an advantage. “I’m a completely naïve student to this material, which is often really great for my work,” she said. “It means that if I don’t understand something on the first explanation, there’s no way someone who is not a professional learner is going to get it.”

Weinbloom says much of instructional design is about being able to quickly and accurately learn a subject matter from imperfect materials or sources, then working to synthesize that information into something that will be accessible to a new or broader range of learners. It’s important to think about who the learners are and what their existing knowledge base is in order to create an effective learning experience.

As part of her work, Weinbloom attended Dr. Goldie’s Spring 2024 GenEd class, listening to lectures, taking notes in section, and working closely with Teaching Fellows—all to help improve the course and assess how students might learn the material better. Weinbloom says the experience of developing course materials and then seeing for herself how that material landed was both refreshing and rewarding.

“So much of what I’ve worked on through my career are things where if there is an actual classroom, it’s not one that I ever set foot in,” said Weinbloom. In section and in the classroom, “I was seeing what they were getting, what they were engaging with, what they were getting excited about, what things they were rolling their eyes at, as well as which activities were resulting in fruitful higher-level discussion, and which were only eliciting more lower-level recall instead of analysis.”

Weinbloom is excellent at her job, but she also strives to keep a healthy work-life balance. Outside of work, she enjoys traveling and being outdoors. For fun, she performs in a small musical theater group that holds shows in domestic spaces around town. Political activism and organizing is also important to Weinbloom—she has campaigned for a variety of local and national issues. In 2016, she even worked on the Clinton presidential campaign.

With her competence, curiosity, and wealth of knowledge stemming from both her professional and personal endeavors, Weinbloom is a wonderful addition to the GHELI team. We’re happy to have you, Liz!